Pakistan briefs diplomats over Kashmir situation

Foreign minister urges world to help resolve dispute as per UNSC resolutions

ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Abdullah Hussain Haroon on Wednesday urged the international community to move beyond political and economic expediencies and help resolve the longstanding Kashmir dispute in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions.

The statement came during a briefing arranged by the foreign office for the heads of diplomatic missions in Pakistan on the current situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK).

“It is time for the international community to move beyond political and economic expediencies and fulfill its promises to the Kashmiri people, as per United Nations Security Council Resolutions,” he stressed, said the foreign minister.

The diplomats were briefed against the backdrop of the recent report by the office of UN Human Rights Commissioner on “developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018 and general human rights concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.”

Foreign office spokesperson Dr Muhamad Faisal opened the briefing with a video, exhibiting the brutal assassination of Shujaat Bukhari and the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian occupation forces in the wake of the issuance of the first Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Report on the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir.

Faisal said that the report had a categorical focus on the Indian atrocities in IOK and explicitly underscored India’s obligation to fulfil its commitment to International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law and to halt the human sufferings in IOK, according to a statement issued by the foreign office.

Hussain Haroon said, “It was regrettable that our fundamental human conscience had been surpassed by our more ‘practical’ interests, when it came to the human rights violations in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir.”